Competition winners take big ideas to small screens

Published
April 24, 2014

Two business ideas for smartphone apps took first place and a
prize of $1,000 each in UB’s second annual Elevator Pitch
Competition.

Undergraduate computer science students Joel Little and Robert
Barber took one of the first-place prizes for their idea for Ethos
Studios, which would produce customized, mobile video games for
business marketing. Undergraduate accounting student Brittany
Popovski was the other first-place winner for ULock, an app that
would lock students out of their cell phones so they can focus on
studying.

The winners stood out among nearly 60 UB undergraduate and
graduate students who pitched business ideas with novel solutions
to real-world challenges. They had just 90 seconds to convince a
panel of expert judges without the use of notes, slides or other
visual aids.

Second-place prizes of $500 each were awarded for pitches from
Andrew Harris, Fred Lee, Anish Paul Anthony and David
Murphy-Longhini.

“The pitch competition is part of a growing effort at UB
to promote entrepreneurship, to realize the promise of UB 2020 and
to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Western New York,”
says Yong Li, academic director of UB’s Entrepreneurship
Academy and associate professor of operations management and
strategy in the School of Management.

The competition, which took place on April 16, was sponsored by
the Entrepreneurship Academy, the School of Management and the
Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach
(STOR). Prizes were supported by the Bruce Holm Memorial Catalyst
Fund.

Judges for the competition were Andrew Shaevel, founder and CEO
of Bobalew Ventures; Oded Spindel, senior venture analyst at Excell
Partners; Robert Shaw, president of Superior Constructors Inc.;
Diane McMahon, entrepreneurial services lead in the National Grid
Program at UB’s New York State Center for Excellence in
Bioinformatics and Life Sciences; and Neil Arnold, angel investor
at Western New York Venture Association.